Introducing: The Prediction Game 🔮

TLDR: 

• We’re launching a new contest and newsletter: The Prediction Game, hosted by Andre Plaut. It’s a competition to predict the events of 2021 for a tantalizing prize.

• Enter by December 31st to make predictions on everything from the stock market to the Olympics. The more predictions you get right, the more points you'll earn.

• The person with the most points at the end of year wins our grand prize: the full value of the Everything Index, a $1,000 fund invested at the beginning of this year by a group of experts including Li Jin, Byrne Hobart, Turner Novak, and Web Smith.

Why predict the future?

by Dan Shipper

Andre Plaut predicted the pandemic—or maybe through sheer psychic power he caused it. I can't tell which one.

In December of 2019 he gifted me his favorite book: The Plague. It's a dark, beautiful novel about—yep, you guessed it—an outbreak of plague in French Algeria.

I read it with abandon. Not as a guide to the future, but as a thought exercise. How would I react in a similar situation?

Little did I know, what I learned in those pages was about to become much less theoretical in the coming year.

Was it pure coincidence? Was it prescience? Or was Andre nudging me with a deep premonition that something bigger would come from this odd outbreak in Wuhan? I don't know—but I do know that being forced to think through a possible future left me better prepared for the actual one we faced.

That's why when Andre came up with the idea of The Prediction Game I was extremely excited. Everyone prognosticates. But The Prediction Game is a chance to put those prognostications on paper, and see how they look at the end of the year. Oh yeah, and win a pretty sweet prize (we'll get to that in a second.)

He ran it last year with a small circle of friends, and they raved about it. So this year we decided to bring it to the whole internet.

Ready to get out your crystal ball?

Or, read on to hear more from Andre.

Why I Started the Prediction Game

by Andre Plaut

I spend a lot of time thinking about the future. I'm guessing most mental health professionals would tell me that I spend too much time thinking about the future. Anticipatory Anxiety, you might